A beautiful day in the neighborhood...

I have been going to a drawing class on Wednesday mornings for the past two weeks, and I love it.  Some people do yoga...I now draw!  I found out about the art class at the Forum des Associations several weeks ago - kind of like a club fair for the town.  It was there that I met my drawing teacher.  It turns out that she lives in the same small village that we do, about a 3 minute walk away!  What are the odds?  Through casual conversation, she learned that Dan "used to be" informaticien/programmeur but is now a "French language learner."  She promised to call if ever they had a problem.  Turns out, they did have a problem - two, in fact.  

My drawing teacher's husband is a dentist and something had happened to his computer at work so that he could not even get the computer to run any programs.  It turned on, but that was about it.  Dan and I went to his office with him on Sunday afternoon, after we returned from a weekend with "the parents" in Rennes.  It was a real head-scratcher for Dan.  He spent a lot of time looking here and there, pressing this and clicking that.  I realize now that I was not helping the situation- Dan was plenty stressed already- but I kept getting him to talk a bit about what he was doing and what was going on.  Imagine how M. le Dentist felt:  Here is a strange American that my wife met, this man is supposedly a computer expert, yet he can't communicate with me.  I have no idea what he is doing - he could be stealing my patient files, for all I know...

Dan eventually got the strange but brilliant idea to try a CD in the CDROM drive.  We still don't know why, but it magically reset the computer so that it worked again.  Dan remembered seeing this once before and thought, "Why not give it a try, nothing else is working...?"  So, the dentist stopped sweating bullets and practically embraced Dan.  We happily rode back home where his wife tried to offer us an apero to celebrate.  "Actually," I said, "Dan would really like to have a look at your home computer"  That experience was a longer one and is Dan's story to tell :)  Long story short, he didn't fix it just then, but we did stay for a champagne aperitif and met their sweet daughter, "Dove."

What a beautiful day in the neighborhood!